Yale sees 5.8 percent increase in apps

Yale received 28,870 applications for admission to the class of 2016, marking a 5.8 percent increase from last year, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said in an email to the News Thursday morning.

The jump comes as other Ivy League schools — Columbia and Penn are the only ones with data out now — have seen their applicant pool shrink this year. Applications to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, meanwhile, jumped by 1 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Harvard and Princeton have yet to release their application numbers.

Brenzel said Yale’s admit rate will probably decline slightly this year, as the University expects to admit about as many students as it did for the class of 2015 — around 2,100.

If Yale were to accept the same number of students as it did last year — 2,109 in total, including waitlist admits — the admit rate would decrease from 7.35 percent to 6.95 percent, Yale’s lowest-ever admit rate.

I might have thought, what with the adoption by Princeton and Harvard of SCEA, that Yale would anticipate a higher yield rate.

Perhaps the projection you report is super conservative, but if “around 2,100″ are admitted for the Class of 2016, and the class size matches the 1,350 for the Class of 2015, then the yield rate will still be stuck at a little over 64%.

Removing all those “true” Harvard and Princeton people from Yale’s SCEA applicant pool was supposed to boost the yield rate three or four percent, I thought, back near the 69.1% level for the Yale Class of 2011 – the last time Harvard and Princeton had early programs. Under this scenario, there would be only 1,950 or so admits to Yale this year, including both SCEA and “regular” admits.